This Side of Paradise

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Overview

THE ACCOMPLISHED AND HEARTBREAKING FIRST NOVEL THAT CATAPULTED F. SCOTT FITZGERALD TO LITERARY FAME AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-THREE

Considered scandalous (and brilliant) when it was published in 1920, This Side of Paradise describes the intellectual, spiritual, and sexual education of young Amory Blaine in the tumultuous America of the early twentieth century. Highly sophisticated yet hopelessly romantic, Amory flounders from prep school to Princeton to glittering Jazz Age New York, confident that he is destined for greatness but unsure how to go about it. Fitzgerald’s razor-sharp re-creation of a defiant, disillusioned generation “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken” makes This Side of Paradise a timeless autobiographical novel of youth and alienation. It moves from tenderness to cynicism to hope with the grace and power that make Fitzgerald one of the greatest of American writers.

NOW INCLUDING THE AUTHOR’S CORRECTED TEXT

With an Introduction by Matthew J. Bruccoli

Praise

“As nearly perfect as such a work could be . . . The glorious spirit of abounding youth glows throughout this fascinating tale. Amory, the romantic egotist, is essentially American.” –The New York Times

“[A] bravura display of literary promise . . . Fitzgerald’s prose is capable of soaring like a violin, and of moving his readers with understated husky notes as well as with notes of piercing purity . . . Fitzgerald knew that glamour was bound to fail, that there is an ineradicable human instinct for it which is utterly mistaken.” –from the Introduction by Craig Raine